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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 5, 2013
really amazing and difficult movements,
he was watching videos of dancers to
get inspiration. When you are thirteen,
you do what your teacher tells you to do.
He did that, but he also had an open-
minded conception of dance when he
was so young."
The conventional course for a French
dancer would be to apply to the École de
Danse, at the Paris Opera Ballet. "There
was a documentary on the
school, and there were all
these boys in gray tights, and
curfews, and teachers with
canes and stuff, and there
was no way I was going
there," Millepied said. The
film that did inspire him was
"White Nights," in which
Baryshnikov starred as a
Russian dancer who flees the
Soviet Union for the freedom of the U.S.
A year after attending summer school
in New York, he enrolled full-time at the
School of American Ballet. By then, Bal-
anchine had been dead for a decade, but
Jerome Robbins was still working. In
1994, Robbins set a ballet, "Two- and
Three-Part Inventions," for students at
the school, including Millepied. Robbins
told a friend, Aidan Mooney, about the
rehearsals: "He said, 'There is a kid who
gets things that no one else gets---he can
shade things.' " Millepied recalls, "You
prepared yourself when you rehearsed
with Jerry. You warmed up for two
hours. You walked into the studio with
this hyper-attention." Robbins, who had
worked with Lee Strasberg, often con-
jured sensual scenarios---like feeling the
sun, or painting the sky---to help danc-
ers anchor themselves emotionally in a
ballet. "When you work with that kind of
genius, it's rare---you realize it when you
lose it---someone who really takes you
places with very few words," Millepied
told me.
Robbins took on Millepied as a pro-
tégé outside the studio, too. "Robbins
basically said to me when I was sixteen,
'You have to see a lot,' " Millepied recalls.
Robbins took him to the ballet and to
Debussy's opera, "Pelléas et Mélisande."
Robbins encouraged friends like Mooney
to take Millepied to plays and museums;
for several years, Millepied lived upstairs
from Mooney's apartment, on St. Marks
Place. "I liked learning, and I often had
people that were older in my life," Mille-
pied says. "I was super, super hungry."
As a choreographer, Millepied owes a
clear debt to Robbins: as in Robbins's
work, his dancers often seem to ignore
the audience, and to adopt a heightened
version of everyday movement. But as a
dancer Millepied was precise and classi-
cal: "More Apollo than Dionysus---in a
way, very French," Jennifer Homans, the
dance critic, says. He joined the company
proper in 1995, and was pro-
moted to soloist three years
later. "He had such amazing
jumps," Ashley Bouder, who
joined the corps in 2000, re-
calls. "We all had crushes on
him, watching him with our
mouths open." A documen-
tary, "Bringing Balanchine
Back," about New York City
Ballet's visit to St. Petersburg
in 2003, shows Millepied vaulting across
the stage in Balanchine's "Symphony in
C," then telling an interviewer that he
was inspired by the spirit of Nijinsky.
Millepied recalls, "For me, that was like
the Olympics. That was the peak of my
technique."
In New York City Ballet's library, he
studied videos of the dancers he most ad-
mired: Helgi Tomasson, who retired in
1985, and Ib Andersen, who retired in
1990. "They were both really poetical
and classical---really elegant and refined,"
he says. "I admired the care of the steps,
not being flashy. I looked up to these
guys who had a sort of selfless, very beau-
tiful way of engaging."
In 2002, he was named principal
dancer. He was particularly noted for his
partnering: the way a male dancer holds
and supports a female dancer, lifting her
just before she jumps so that her ascent
seems effortless. Janie Taylor, who often
danced with Millepied, says of him, "I al-
ways felt really comfortable and well
taken care of. For some guys, it is a really
natural thing, and for other guys they
have to learn it." If Millepied brought
to his dancing an intuitive understand-
ing of women, he says that performing
Balanchine's pas de deux had a recipro-
cal influence on the way he perceived
women. "Balanchine had his own obses-
sion with women---how he presented
them, the aspect of chivalry," Millepied
says. "Learning how to do those duets
affected me in a big way. When you are
dancing these pas de deux over and over
again, it has some impact. You pay atten-
tion to how a woman moves. You watch
her, very carefully."
The episodes onstage that Millepied
recalls most vividly are not lifts or leaps
but moments of stillness. A favorite role
was Oberon, in Balanchine's "A Mid-
summer Night's Dream": "There is a
moment before the scherzo, one of the
finest classical solos, and you stand on-
stage in the darkness, and that moment
of silence was so thrilling. I could see the
audience---they were lit, like moonlight
was on them. You are playing a king, and
you feel like a king."
Despite these triumphs, Millepied
grew restless. After being promoted to
principal dancer, he went to Peter Mar-
tins, the company director, and told him
that he wanted to choreograph, for the
company and elsewhere. "He said, 'Peter,
I have too many ideas,' " Martins told
me. Millepied founded his own small
company, Danses Concertantes. It per-
formed in Europe, and in the Hamptons,
where Millepied encountered wealthy art
lovers who became donors, including
members of the Arpels family. Martins
was not surprised by his success: "He's
very smart, and he's very charming."
Meanwhile, Millepied choreo-
graphed for other companies. In 2006,
he made "Amoveo," a work set to music
by Philip Glass, for the Paris Opera Bal-
let. Glass proposed to Millepied that
Nico Muhly, then a young composer
working for Glass, go to Paris to con-
duct the piece. "Benjamin listens to
music for pleasure actively, not just as
background music," Muhly says. "It was
never just 'I like this, and I want to dance
to it.' He was engaging with it in a less
practical-minded way, and more in the
head." As a result, Muhly says, Mil-
lepied is able to navigate an orchestral
score with an unusual degree of sophis-
tication: "He appreciates what it is doing
structurally, and he appreciates bigger
shapes, and he appreciates them coming
back, and he appreciates technical stuff."
His latest collaboration with Millepied
will have its première at New York City
Ballet's annual gala, in September.
Millepied's peripatetic career as a cho-
reographer took a toll on his dancing, as
did several foot injuries, and he per-
formed less and less at New York City
Ballet, even while he remained, nomi-
nally, a principal dancer. "We couldn't